ICED2010


 * Final PowerPoint and Handouts for distribution:**

NT additions 20 June in green
 * Catherine's additions to the wiki 17 May 2010 ​**

CM addtions 17 June 2010 in purple

Thanks so much Trevor and Brad for setting up this wiki and getting us started on our ICED symposium

So far my overall thinking about our symposium is that we will allow approx 25 mins per each section (which can be some interactive activities rather than a paper)

So this is what the overall timing of our symposium (1.5 hours) could look like:


 * 5 min overall intro - I am happy to do write this and introduce our whole team - will add this in a separate section below


 * 25 mins first section on neutrality (as Trevor mapped out below) - Trevor, Brad, Beverley, Catherine, others?
 * 5 min our intro
 * 5 min own metaphors
 * 10 mins discuss in groups
 * 5 mins further insights
 * 25 mins next section on non-neutrality of AD tools - Gail, Nancy
 * 1) 5 minute intro - Overview of position of this segment of the symposium (coming down to earth to excavate/investigate) in order to focus on 1:1 consultancy relationship, explore layers of sometimes tacit aspects of our practice and the consequences of their non-neutrality.
 * 2) 8 minutes intro of mental models and participant poll. Distribute handout summarizing the mental models of consulting relationships. Participants read; poll taken:
 * 3) “Is your espoused model the same as the model you actually use? “
 * 4) ask up to 4 participants to explain their responses to the poll.
 * 5) 3 minutes to hand out example instruments of academic development.
 * 6) 8 minutes discuss in groups and produce grafitti wall. Groups consider instruments in light of these questions:
 * 7) Are there implicit values/ideological stances embedded in these models and instruments?
 * 8) To what extent do the values of the individual using the models and instruments influence the way in which they are used?
 * 9) They then produce a grafitti wall, suitable for future excavators to interpret, expressing their answers to these questions.
 * 10) 1 minute conclusion: Gail and Nancy pulling out some key ideas that have been found as we circulate
 * 25 mins next section on marginality - David, Deandra


 * 3 min **overview** axes, including **Question & Poll**
 * 1) Question: Of these two, which feels most relevant to your institution – disciplinary or people (perhaps with reference to map/metaphor from part 1), What tensions are there that you feel stuck in between? Perhaps you’ve been trying to be neutral, but find yourself positioned on the margins of one or another camp?
 * 2) Poll – how many of you have picked structural, how many epistemological


 * 5 min **overview** of terms at each extreme – What happens when each of these becomes too dominant. (HO: ½ sheet, with grid & definition of terms on one side & marginal roles on other)
 * 5 min transition (AD on margins of these) **discussion of Stonequist’s roles**
 * 12 min **think/pair/share**:
 * 1) **Think/Pair:** Which of these roles most closely resembles what you are doing at the moment with the dominant group? Which would allow you to work with integrity? Which other ones might be viable alternatives?
 * 2) **Share**: What might we lose by claiming a marginal position in our institutions or by reconceptualizing our "imaginary homelands" (Rushdie, 1991)? What might we gain?


 * 10 mins overall discussion and wrap up - we can decide when we talk Sunday night

**The [im]possibilities of neutrality: metaphors of nation for academic developer identities** Universities are geopolitical spaces. Within the territorial spaces of post-secondary institutions, it is often said that academic development should be ‘like Switzerland’, meaning ‘neutral’ in contrast to other university zones. We argue that, the neutral zone in which academic developers work is a kind of fictional truth which allows us to operate without owning our actions in real terms. This session will explore the tropes of neutrality and engagement, also exploring other less dominant forms of neutrality (e.g. Ireland or Iceland) and other metaphors of national identity that can be applied to academic development in order to question what possibilities these tropes open up and close down. I suggest that we do something that is loosely based on the EDC 2010 event, accessible on the left navigation menu. We could have 11x17 maps on which participants come up with metaphors of nation for their own institutions, discussing implications with a neighbour. We could frame the thing by having a handout with nifty quotes, like the one I put together for EDC, only with Brad-Trevor-Catherine quotes. Catherine and I might talk about Ireland while Brad handles Iceland, though we might start with an overview of this whole Switzerland mythos. 5 mins b/g how this topic came about and its relation to prior work in the field (postcolonial, border crossings, etc.); hand out trigger quotes and questions 5 mins on own metaphors 10 mins discuss in pairs or small groups 5 mins collect one insight or one further question from partipants (orally at first and then on index cards for later responses) I’ve been thinking about your comments for a while now and wanted to suggest that it is important to recognise the massive diversity in activities of ADUs across Australia. I know that some Australian ADUs are heavily involved in QA (perhaps like Uni Sydney) and that other universities have set up Quality offices that are separate to ADUs (I think this happened at Monash a few years ago). But many ADUs are not at all directly involved in QA other than administering (in a ‘neutral’ way) teaching and course evaluations, although I have detected a few slight changes here that I’ll talk about more below, and, as you point out, we’ve been compelled to support (when requested usually) certain initiatives like graduate attributes etc (which are anything but neutral). For example, at UQ each faculty retained 5% of their teaching budget for what was called Teaching Quality Assurance (TQA) but it was totally at the discretion of the Dean/Associate Dean Academic and Faculty Committees. Even within UQ there was huge variation in how that money was allocated. Some faculties took a democratic approach and allocated it evenly across their Schools, others requested applications for TL strategic projects, others used it to reward good teaching results and yet others used it to assist Schools not doing so well in their teaching. Also at UQ we have 3 rolling QA processes that involve (to varying extents) teaching quality. We have the annual TQA process, we have a curriculum review process every 3 years and a 7 year review of Schools (which covers all aspects of the Schools operations including research and service etc as well as teaching). The first 2 are done internally within the Faculty and the third one is carried out by a panel external to the university. So TEDI is not directly involved in any of these processes.We are sometimes called upon to assist faculties or schools with curriculum review and we are certainly involved in large-scale uni teaching agendas (like mapping graduate attributes across all ug and pg coursework courses a few years ago) but we are in an advisory capacity only rather than actively measuring or rewarding QA (except through teaching and course evaluations). Also it’s important to point out the variation across the uni in how we were involved in the graduate attribute mapping exercise a few years ago. Many faculties did this on their own with very little input from us, others requested our presence on many committees and working parties doing this. I was the Arts TEDI rep at the time and they were very happy just to do this themselves with minimal input from me. I respected their authority and wasn’t unduly concerned about not being involved. I guess part of this also comes about because of the separation of TEDI from the Office of DVC- Academic. Although our director reports to the DVC-A, the links between TEDI and her office are in actual practice quite distant. In some ways this can make our roles difficult but in others it keeps us at arms length from QA police work. I think it also varies between individual academic developers too – my approach is rather light-handed here (and sometimes pained as illustrated in my writing) because I feel quite torn about any form of TL ‘police’ work. Others are much more committed to the TL mission. I also suppose it depends on what you mean with QA initiatives Brad. It would be great to hear more about how you define these and how you’ve seen them played out at other Australian (and British) unis. I also think that it’s not so much that Australian ADUs don’t feel compelled to be neutral. I suspect we probably all pay lip service to this, although I have noticed an in-house banter about parts of the uni committed to ‘good’ teaching and those not. I often feel compelled to defend Arts in these kinds of ‘back-stage’ discussions and to point out some of the philosophical reasons people might have to resist TL and QA agendas. I’ve written with Tai about this and also about comments about the ‘pedagogically unwashed’ in my 2006 IJAD article. It’s just that there is not a public discourse in Australia (that I’ve come across at least) exhorting us to be neutral or in-house discussions about our neutrality. It’s interesting that there are these public discourses in Canada and I think our paper might be able to tease out why this might be different in Australia and Canada. Now to the teaching and course evaluations issue.Do Canadian ADUs get involved in this at all? If not, who does this work? Almost from the very beginnings of ADUs in the 60s in Australia, they carried out evaluations. In the beginning, this was heavily linked with equity agendas and student union and staff union concerns about poor teaching and the impact it had on students. This is all well before people had heard the word ‘quality’, which started to come into the Australian TL discourse around the early 90s and then with a vengeance in the 2000s. Because these are used for tenure and promotion purposes as well as curriculum review, our union the National Tertiary Ed Union (NTEU) has always been heavily involved in how these get administered and who the results are reported to. In the past, there was a practice of having a public part of teaching evals using standardised questions (slightly different in most unis) and a second formative part that academics could use to get feedback on developmental parts of their teaching and that was regarded as private. Just in the last year, this seems to be changing at UQ. We used to have ‘rules’ set by the DVC-A about courses being evaluated every 2-3 years (I think) and academics ordered their own teaching evaluations etc. Now some changes have just been introduced allowing for automatic generation of teaching evals and course evals will happen every year (or maybe even every semester – not sure) and now all evals (including teaching ones) will go to course coordinators rather than individual teachers. This is under the guise of greater efficiency but I personally think there are dangers of greater surveillance here. These changes are being announced in faculty TL Committees (TLC) and being hotly debated there as well as being carefully scrutinised by the union (NTEU). These changes appear to be being directed by the DVC-A but in close consultation with our Director and with the Head of the Evaluations part of TEDI (who is also an academic). I think I caused a bit of consternation at the Arts TLC for the TEDI person introducing these changes to the meeting by adding some critical questions to the debate. But the reaction of my Arts colleagues is interesting. Often they look at me in disbelief and suspicion when I appear to jump out of my TEDI TL police role and ask the kind of questions they like to ask. Rather than leading to helpful debate or a sense that challenges perceptions about our police role, it seems to reinforce all this. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe these percpetions are just far too strong to be dislodged by my critical questions or my carefully light-handed approach. Do you have these kinds of expereinces?
 * Catherine's random thoughts in response to Brad's question, 7 June 2010**
 * Brad's question, 25 May 2010**
 * Catherine's response 7 June 2010**
 * Bev's response 7 June 2010:**
 * Catherine's addtions 17 June 2010**//this is my more finalised version of my reflections on neutrality and AD. I've deleted the old version and replaced it with this one.//
 * Metaphors of nation in the construction of Australian developer identities: ‘neutrality’ or critical transcultural, interdisciplinary exchange in the academic development contact zone **

Catherine Manathunga In the Australian context, there has been less overt emphasis on the need for academic development centres to be neutral.I don’t recall being explicitly encouraged to be like Switzerland and adopt a neutral position in the geopolitical landscape of the university.Perhaps things are more muted and implicit in Australia and our academic colleagues in faculties simply assume we will be neutral in our dealings with them or that they will have equal access to our services and support. Interestingly enough, it has been my experience (and that of some of my colleagues at other universities) that some of the less resourced and powerful disciplines are the least likely to access our programs.In my university and in others, academic colleagues in Arts and Humanities faculties are under-represented in attendance at university-wide professional development programs, in applying for university and national teaching and learning grants and awards and in requesting some of the other support we offer.As Tai Peseta and I have argued (Peseta & Manathunga, 2008) part of the reason for this is a more sharply, epistemologically driven resistance to the project of academic development as a neo-liberal endeavour. Although like Tereigh Ewert-Bauer, I have also received feedback recently that some of my professional development programs for supervisors are too heavily focused on the humanities.While this will need to be addressed, I have also noticed that my humanities colleagues are often more adept at applying dominant, normalised science-focused material, ideas and strategies to their own very different contexts.It’s something about greater skills of adaptation and transculturation when you sit on the margins.I think often dominant groups don’t see the water they are swimming in and react quite angrily when their specific needs don’t seem to be being addressed. As Trevor, Brad, Bev and Tereigh Ewert-Bauer have argued, there are significant issues, even dangers, in taking on the mantle of neutrality in academic development.Switzerland dominates our imaginations when we think about metaphors of neutrality.Yet, as Trevor, Brad and Bev have ably demonstrated, there are many troubling sides to Swiss neutrality that reveal the very real power plays, desires for independence, self-preservation and wealth-creation, ongoing racism and anti-Semitism rendered invisible by the white-out of neutrality.If we think back to Machiavelli, there is an a-moralism to neutrality.Ask no questions, get told no lies.Take no position on what is right and wrong (although these are usually hotly contested notions).Take no responsibility for your own actions or for those that occur on your soil.Turn your head the other way while people launder money, illegally horde the spoils of war and holocaust.Such an approach would absolve us as academic developers not only of the real power plays we engage in and the constructions we effect on those we ‘develop’ but also remove any claim we might have to break-throughs, innovations or cultural change that might come of our actions in collaboration with our faculty-based academic colleagues. Then, as Trevor and Brad have outlined, there are other alternative forms of neutrality that are worth investigating for possible resonances for academic development centres.In particular, Irish neutrality (especially during WWII but also more recently) is a particularly interesting trope.Irish neutrality emerged in WWII mainly out of a post-colonial demonstration of its national sovereignty and resistance to ongoing British neo-colonialism (Quirke, 1985).However, in the years until Ireland was accepted into the UN in 1956, Irish neutrality resulted in the ongoing isolation and political, social and economic stagnation of Ireland (Quirke, 1990; Manathunga, 1995).Bev has also pointed to this marginalising effect of Irish neutrality. Whichever form of neutrality is drawn upon as a guiding metaphor for academic development, the fundamental issue is that being neutral or even aiming for neutrality denies the very real power dynamics, symbolic violence, conflict, inequities, moments of colonisation and dominance that characterise any world system, including universities. I wonder whether the notion of ‘middle powers’ from international relations literature might be a more useful concept to draw on which also mirrors some of Bev’s comments about mediating and securing diplomatic immunity which are different to neutrality.Middle powers often seek and may actively mediate compromise solutions in international conflicts, try to act as good global citizens, and often take part in conflict management and resolution missions, especially in UN peacekeeping forces (Ping, 2005).Interestingly, Brad has questioned the neutrality involved in being part of UN peacekeeping missions in relation to Ireland’s role in some of these forces.Certainly Irish involvement in the UN peacekeeping endeavour in the Congo in the early 1960s proved to be problematic especially for some Irish diplomats like Conor Cruise O’Brien (Manathunga, 1995). Because they usually lack the political, economic and military might of great powers, middle powers pursue what have been called ‘international milieu goals’ like peace-building, decolonisation and disarmament in order to protect their political, economic and security interests (Manathunga, 1995; Wolfers, 1962). While this idea was particularly used during the Cold War and countries like Australia, Canada, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Malaysia and Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, and Turkey have been given this label (Cooper et al., 1993; Stokke, 1989; Ping, 2005), the idea retains some of its power since the end of the Cold War (Cooper, 1997; Cohen & Clarkson, 2004).A number of scholars have also called this ‘niche diplomacy’ (Cooper, 1997). A related concept during the Cold War period was that of ‘non-alignment’ and that included countries like India, the former Yugoslavia and Indonesia.These countries sort to take a more neutral positioning in the polarised Western vs Soviet Cold War world. Trevor and Brad have talked about calls in academic development not to be like Britain or Australia in terms of quality assurance agendas and research and teaching and learning assessment exercises.This is interesting from an Australian perspective.Although most academic development units (ADUs) in Australia have been called upon to participate in teaching and learning agendas like graduate attributes, it is important to recognise the diversity of activities of ADUs across Australia in terms of their relationship to quality assurance (QA).Some ADUs may have been more heavily involved in quality assurance measurement and reward like the University of Sydney and other universities have set up Quality offices that are separate to ADUs (I think this happened at Monash a few years ago). But many ADUs are not at all directly involved in QA other than administering (in a ‘neutral’ way) teaching and course evaluations, although I have detected a few slight changes here that I’ll talk about more below. For example, at the University of Queensland (UQ) each faculty retained 5% of their teaching budget for what was called Teaching Quality Assurance (TQA) but it was totally at the discretion of the Dean/Associate Dean Academic and Faculty Committees. Even within UQ there was huge variation in how that money was allocated. Some faculties took a democratic approach and allocated it evenly across their Schools, others requested applications for TL strategic projects, others used it to reward good teaching results and yet others used it to assist Schools not doing so well in their teaching. Also at UQ we have 3 rolling QA processes that involve (to varying extents) teaching quality. We have the annual TQA process, we have a curriculum review process every 3 years and a 7 year review of Schools (which covers all aspects of the Schools operations including research and service etc as well as teaching). The first 2 are done internally within the Faculty and the third one is carried out by a panel external to the university. So our ADU, the Teaching and Educational Development Institute (TEDI), is not directly involved in any of these processes. We are sometimes called upon to assist faculties or schools with curriculum review and we are certainly involved in large-scale uni teaching agendas (like mapping graduate attributes across all ug and pg coursework courses a few years ago) but we are in an advisory capacity only rather than actively measuring or rewarding QA (except through teaching and course evaluations). Also it’s important to point out the variation across the university in how we were involved in the graduate attribute mapping exercise a few years ago. Many faculties did this on their own with very little input from us, others requested our presence on many committees and working parties doing this. I was the Arts TEDI rep at the time and they were very happy just to do this themselves with minimal input from me. I respected their authority and wasn’t unduly concerned about not being involved. I guess part of this also comes about because of the separation of TEDI from the Office of DVC- Academic. Although our director reports to the DVC-A, the links between TEDI and her office are in actual practice quite distant. In some ways this can make our roles difficult but in others it keeps us at arms length from QA police work. I think it also varies between individual academic developers too – my approach is rather light-handed here (and sometimes pained as illustrated in my writing) because I feel quite torn about any form of TL ‘police’ work. Others are much more committed to the TL mission. I also think that it’s not so much that Australian ADUs don’t feel compelled to be neutral. I suspect we probably all pay lip service to this, although I have noticed an in-house banter about parts of the uni committed to ‘good’ teaching and those not. I often feel compelled to defend Arts in these kinds of ‘back-stage’ discussions and to point out some of the philosophical reasons people might have to resist TL and QA agendas. I’ve written with Tai about this and also about comments about the ‘pedagogically unwashed’ in my 2006 IJAD article (Manathunga, 2006). It’s just that there is not a public discourse in Australia (that I’ve come across at least) exhorting us to be neutral or in-house discussions about our neutrality. It’s interesting that there are these public discourses in Canada and I think our paper might be able to tease out why this might be different in Australia and Canada. Now to the teaching and course evaluations issue. Do Canadian ADUs get involved in this at all? If not, who does this work? Almost from the very beginnings of ADUs in the 60s in Australia, they carried out evaluations. In the beginning, this was heavily linked with equity agendas and student union and staff union concerns about poor teaching and the impact it had on students. This is all well before people had heard the word ‘quality’, which started to come into the Australian TL discourse around the early 90s and then with a vengeance in the 2000s. Because these are used for tenure and promotion purposes as well as curriculum review, our union the National Tertiary Ed Union (NTEU) has always been heavily involved in how these get administered and who the results are reported to. In the past, there was a practice of having a public part of teaching evals using standardised questions (slightly different in most unis) and a second formative part that academics could use to get feedback on developmental parts of their teaching and that was regarded as private. Just in the last year, this seems to be changing at UQ. We used to have ‘rules’ set by the DVC-A about courses being evaluated every 2-3 years (I think) and academics ordered their own teaching evaluations etc. Now some changes have just been introduced allowing for automatic generation of teaching evals and course evals will happen every year (or maybe even every semester – not sure) and now all evals (including teaching ones) will go to course coordinators rather than individual teachers. This is under the guise of greater efficiency but I personally think there are dangers of greater surveillance here. These changes are being announced in faculty TL Committees (TLC) and being hotly debated there as well as being carefully scrutinised by the union (NTEU). These changes appear to be being directed by the DVC-A but in close consultation with our Director and with the Head of the Evaluations part of TEDI (who is also an academic). I think I caused a bit of consternation at the Arts TLC for the TEDI person introducing these changes to the meeting by adding some critical questions to the debate. But the reaction of my Arts colleagues is interesting. Often they look at me in disbelief and suspicion when I appear to jump out of my TEDI TL police role and ask the kind of questions they like to ask. Rather than leading to helpful debate or a sense that challenges perceptions about our police role, it seems to reinforce all this. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe these perceptions are just far too strong to be dislodged by my critical questions or my carefully light-handed approach. So I think I prefer to use the metaphor of ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1992) rather than neutrality to capture the in-between zone occupied by academic development.Pratt originally coined the term ‘contact zone’ to refer to the cultural space of contact between different cultures during the process of colonization.She was seeking to reconceptualise this in-between zone as ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt, 1992, p. 4). The reason I think it is so powerful for academic development is that it captures both the deconstructive possibilities for transculturation of academic developers and the colleagues that they work with as well as the power dynamics, exploitation and symbolic violence that is present in any world system, including universities.Transculturation was also defined by Pratt (1992) as the process by which subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant … culture.While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own and what they use it for (Pratt, 1992, p. 6). So I have argued that one possible way of managing the in-between space of academic development is to work towards facilitating critical transcultural exchange (Manathunga, 2010).This builds upon Pratt’s notion of transculturation, Rowland’s (2006) concept of academic development as a ‘critical interdisciplinary space’ and some of my work on facilitating mutual, reciprocal, respectful exchange with our academic colleagues (Manathunga, 2006).
 * References **

Cohen, M & Clarkson, S. (eds.) (2004).//Governing under stress : middle powers and the challenge of globalization.// London: Zed Books. Cooper, A. (ed.) (1997). //Niche diplomacy: middle powers after the Cold War//. New York: St. Martin's Press. Cooper et al., A. (1993//).Relocating middle powers : Australia and Canada in a changing world order.// Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Manathunga, C. (1995).The evolution of Irish United Nations policy 1957-61: ‘maverick’ diplomacy and the interaction of ‘possession’ and international ‘milieu’ goals.Unpublished PhD thesis.Brisbane: The University of Queensland. Manathunga, C.(2006). Doing educational development ambivalently: Applying post-colonial metaphors to educational development?//International Journal for Academic Development//. 11:1, 19-29. Peseta, T. & (2008).The anxiety of making academics over: resistance and responsibility in academic development.In Morley, I. (Ed.) //The Value of Knowledge: interdisciplinary perspectives.//Oxford: Rodopi, pp. 79-94. Ping, J. (2005). //Middle// //power statecraft: Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Asia Pacific//. USA: Ashgate. (1985).Sovereignty and neutrality: Anglo-Irish relations during WWII.Unpublished Honours Thesis.Brisbane: The University of Queensland. Quirke, N. (1990).//Irish foreign policy 1945-55: the relationship between neutrality and sovereignty in a changing domestic and international environment//.Unpublished PhD thesis.Brisbane: The University of Queensland. Stokke, O. (ed.) (1989).//Western middle powers and global poverty : the determinants of the aid policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden//. Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, in cooperation with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs; Stockholm, Sweden. Wolfers, A. (1962).//Discord and collaboration//.Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.

Academic development has been described as a marginal space of migration (Manathunga, 2007). It has also been characterized as “neutral”. This Challenging Academic Development (CAD) Collective symposium challenges notions that academic development can ever be a neutral zone by exploring forms of neutrality and national identities; investigating the non-neutrality of the academic development tools; and drawing on Stonequist’s (1937/1961) arguments about marginality to rethink how academic developers might operate independently with integrity. academic development, marginality, neutrality, hybridity Participants will be able to: 1. Unearth and analyze underlying disciplinary, cultural, and ethical assumptions that shape the work of the developer 2. Plan new and innovative solutions to problems stemming from their location in a consulting relationship, a field, and/or organization This symposium will be an interactive journey, where participants will navigate the political landscapes of academic development. The sections below represent three modes of navigating and occupying the landscape, nation states and terrains of academic development. Participants will discuss and map their own academic development work, relative to their institutional topography. **The [im]possibilities of neutrality: metaphors of nation for academic developer identities** Universities are geopolitical spaces. Within the territorial spaces of post-secondary institutions, it is often said that academic development should be ‘like Switzerland’, meaning ‘neutral’ in contrast to other university zones. We argue that, the neutral zone in which academic developers work is a kind of fictional truth which allows us to operate without owning our actions in real terms. This session will explore the tropes of neutrality and engagement, also exploring other less dominant forms of neutrality (e.g. Ireland or Iceland) and other metaphors of national identity that can be applied to academic development in order to question what possibilities these tropes open up and close down. **Investigating the non-neutrality of academic development tools** Academic developers are often positioned as intermediaries who wield value-neutral tools—language, models, and techniques—to foster change in university teachers. Brinko’s (1991) taxonomy exemplifies the tacit acceptance of this code while acknowledging power differentials, the influence of communities of practice, and the interplay of practical and technical human interests. Recognizing the non-neutrality of the academic developer’s tools, however, opens the way to constructive reflection, intentional practice, and ethical consulting choices. **Academic Development on the Margins** Brinko, K. T. (1991). The interactions of teaching improvement. In M. Theall & J. Franklin (eds.) Effective Practices for Improving Teaching: New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 48. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Manathunga, C. (2007). “Unhomely” academic developer identities: More post-colonial explorations. //International Journal for Academic Development, 12//(1): 25-34. Rushdie, S. (1991). //Imaginary homelands.// London: Granta. Stonequist, E.V. (1937). //The Marginal Man: A Study In Personality and Culture Conflict//. New York: Russell & Russell. 1961.